Newt Gingrich’s bizarre launch of his expected 2012 presidential bid, in which he scooped his own news in a morning radio interview and took just one question at the brief official afternoon event, was a déjà vu moment for many political veterans.

The message: Welcome Back to Newt’s World, where an enduring axiom is to expect the unexpected.

As a House member, and in his later iteration as a pundit, Gingrich could get away with running a freewheeling operation. But now, as he’s poised to make a bid for the White House, the most immediate question he’ll face is whether he — and his sprawling political enterprise — can muster the message discipline demanded by the rigors of a national campaign.

In 1994, the brash new House speaker would stride through Capitol Hill hallways making policy announcements to small groups of reporters while his press and policy aides sat clueless in their offices.

In one Georgia campaign swing in 1995, he called for the mass execution of drug smugglers because it would drive up recruitment costs for drug-runners in Colombia and Mexico.

When facing a rebellion from within his own caucus after midterm losses in November 1998, the self-proclaimed “transformational” historic figure issued a brief statement to about 20 reporters camped out at his office that said essentially: I quit.

More than a decade after that fateful night and at least one prior aborted presidential bid in 2007, Gingrich now must conquer the hubris, bravado and lack of restraint that contributed to the end of his historic speakership.

“The defining issue is does he have the judgment and character to be president of the United States. One of the biggest questions about Newt Gingrich throughout his career has been his executive judgment,” said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.

“His four years as the most important leader in Congress were not a success. He had policy successes, but in keeping his party together and supportive of his leadership, he was not a success. That is the closest analogue to him serving as president,” he added.

The repeated misfires of his campaign rollout provide ominous signs. Gingrich’s team built anticipation for a full-blown presidential announcement earlier this week, only to retrench when insiders realized legal issues remained unresolved. The scaled-back event on Thursday turned strange when the former speaker took one question and bolted from what was supposed to be his comeback moment.

Despite the rocky start, close friends and advisers say Gingrich has grown in his years outside the public eye.

“He’s had a chance to be significantly more thoughtful about some of the issues than he was able to be when he was trying to keep all the balls in the air as speaker,” said former Rep. Bob Walker (R-Pa.).

“His moving around the country and talking to a variety of audiences has also given him a sense of perspective about the country that he didn’t have before,” Walker added.

Other former colleagues are not convinced.

“I don’t see a change in his behavior. He still has the grandiose views of himself, his ideas, his position in the party and the world,” said another former House Republican.

“He will be a player, but he won’t be the candidate. God help us if he is the candidate,” he added.

Even some close to Gingrich are convinced that his Oval Office aspirations are driven as much by a desire to return to government service as it is to soothe an ego and settle a question once and for all: Could the former military brat and history college instructor have made it to the top?

It’s a nagging unknown that nearly drove Gingrich into the 2008 presidential contest. But that bid ended as quickly as it started after his legal team concluded— as they did this week — that he hadn’t broken ties to the complex consortium of money-making ventures he has built since leaving office to legally become a candidate.

In the past 12 years, Gingrich has made millions giving speeches, writing books and serving on corporate boards where he dazzled corporate executives with his provocative thinking — sometimes to the consternation of the rank and file inside company Washington government affairs offices, sources said.

In addition, the former speaker has created several think-tank operations that have explored issues ranging from energy and education reform to Catholicism, which Gingrich converted to after leaving office and whose teachings on forgiveness he is employing to persuade social conservatives to get beyond the facts that he had at least two affairs and is twice divorced.

As much as Gingrich’s exceptionally creative, out-of-the-box thinking evokes a gauzy nostalgia among some Republicans, the speaker’s decision to launch his presidency now will undoubtedly stir memories of a stormier chapter in his tenure: the 1995-96 partial government shutdowns.

House Speaker John Boehner, who was among Gingrich’s lieutenants in the clash with the Clinton administration two decades ago, has said the last thing he wants to do is relive events that many Republicans believe permanently hobbled their majority.

As tensions were mounting in 1995, Gingrich stunned the political world by asserting at an otherwise routine breakfast with reporters that one reason for the budget impasse was that he and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole had to exit Air Force One by the back stairs during a trip to Israel.

“You’ve been on the plane for 25 hours and nobody has talked to you, and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp ... You just wonder, where is their sense of manners?” Gingrich said.

That “snub,” he added, was one reason congressional Republicans sent Clinton “a tougher continuing resolution,” which the president vetoed. Outcry from those remarks prompted Dole to declare “enough is enough” and cut a deal with the White House.

One issue Gingrich is certainly not interested in reviving is the ethics case that plagued his speakership and that, Walker said, is one reason his campaign put the brakes on Thursday’s anticipated announcement.

“There is a sense that we need to be very, very careful and make sure all the T’s are crossed and I’s dotted on the way to taking action,” said Walker, who plans to work on Gingrich’s campaign once it is announced.

But all the smart lawyers and advisers may not be able to protect Gingrich from his greatest vulnerability: his penchant for speaking off the cuff.

He has accused Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of “behaving exactly in the spirit of Soviet tyranny” and warned that Obama’s “secular socialist machine” represented “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

For the White House — and Gingrich’s GOP opponents — the trove of eye-popping quotes is as deep and rich as his political career. Any one of them could be given new life in a presidential campaign.

Among them is this classic from a Reinhardt College discussion about the meaning of combat, which could find traction at a time when the nation is involved in two wars:

“If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don’t have upper-body strength ... On the other hand, men are basically little piglets. You drop them in the ditch, and they roll around in it.”

“On the other hand,” he continued, “if combat means being on an Aegis Class Cruiser managing the computer controls for 12 ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male, who get very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a longtime Gingrich ally, said Gingrich’s rhetorical excesses shouldn’t disqualify a run and that voters will figure out his real meaning. “It hasn’t killed him yet. It helps him make his points,” said Norquist. “If it was the first time you ever met him, you’d go ‘Whoa.’ But eventually you realize, that’s Newt.”